François Matarasso

Blog

arestlessart.com/

Profile

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  • Easy art

    Digital technology is changing our lives in such profound ways that it’s not easy to understand what kind of society or culture will emerge. Past experience suggests that its new powers will have mixed consequences. Already it enables people both to share knowledge through Wikipedia and to threaten strangers on Twitter, and those are only…

  • Streetwise Opera needs help

    This is another unusual post. (I seem to be making a habit of that just now, but normal business will be resumed shortly.) It’s about Streetwise Opera, a community music organisation that works with and supports people with experience of homelessness. I first heard about them about 15 years ago, and I’ve seen several of…

  • Returning to Regular Marvels

    Ten years ago, I made a website called, Regular Marvels, to support what became a series of five creative projects, but it has been hibernating since 2015, when the last of the books created under that title was published. The following year I began work on what became A Restless Art, a project about participatory and community…

  • Come to Rotterdam

    This might be my simplest blog post yet. All I want to do is encourage you to come to Rotterdam at the end of next month and be part of a huge, friendly, inspirational community art festival. ICAF runs from 25 to 29 March 2020, and if you miss it, you’ll wait three years for…

  • On the value of ‘good enough’

    Listening to a radio discussion about failure in the arts, I asked myself why I’ve always had reservations about the idea – or rather about how it’s talked about in this industry. One problem was evident in this conversation, despite Tom Shakespeare‘s careful moderation. Michael Billington spoke about failure in art (for instance when a…

  • The continuing validity of community development

    For all their differences, for all the good they do achieve, these schemes have two things in common: they’re supposed to solve problems that arise – directly or not – from past policy decisions, and they are all time limited.